Comdex Bites the Vegas Dust

The word came through the morning newspaper: there will be no Comdex this year.

It has been "postponed" until 2005. I doubt it. Rather, this sounds like the death knell for the one event that described the arc of the personal computer business, from its informal, hippiefied beginnings in 1979, through an exuberant decade running from the late 80s through the late 90s, to some alarming wretched excess in 2000, to its swift and apparently fatal downfall in the 21st century.

Let me clear about something right up front: Comdex never won any friends. For years it was a must-attend event for the industry, but one that was often dreaded, usually loathed, and tolerable only with solid expense accounts that covered rented drivers, golf, and nights at the Crazy Horse or Olympic Gardens.

Remember the 80s?

In the 80s, as the show started to gather serious steam, Las Vegas was characterized by a shortage of hotel rooms for a convention this size and a complete lack of decent hotel rooms for an event of any size. The show's organizers took advantage of this situation by controlling hotel bookings, jacking up the prices for less-than-mediocre rooms to appalling levels, then taking a percentage of the excess for themselves.

The incredible Vegas hotel construction boom started in the late 80s with the Mirage, and added an additional three to five thousand rooms each year for a decade, obviating the previous shortage and bringing accommodations up to standard. Prices continued to climb, too, with the show organizers continuing to very publicly benefit from what felt, to attendees, like extortionist rates.

You Had to Be There

But what were ya gonna do about it? You had to be there. Your company had to be there, and in a big way. Never mind that major parts of the main exhibit floor felt like morning in Shinjuku station. Never mind that for many years the exhibits were scattered throughout a dozen major hotels, with some unfortunates banished to the McCarran center all the way downtown. Never mind that taxi lines were 90 minutes long, rental cars almost impossible to get, and good shuttle service non-existent.

Comdex was where you had to be. Each year it seemed to get a little bigger, each year major announcements were either made or solidified there, and each year Comdex played an important role in hooking up vendors with dealers, resellers, and the industry media.

There was a little dip in enthusiasm during an early-90s tech downturn, but nothing that seriously threatened the show. Most industry veterans will remember that Spring Comdex was a big deal in those days as well, even though it shuttled between Atlanta and Chicago, trying to find its definitive place in the world. Microsoft came to the rescue of this event in this timeframe by working with the producer to cast it as a "Windows World" event, and for awhile, this strategy seemed to be a good one. The show had a clear strategy and drew a very large, but not overwhelming, group of people who were continuing to create an industry.

Things Start to Get Ugly

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, the show seemed to get fatter and sloppier every year. The company I was with in the glory days, IDG, chartered helicopters two years in a row to ferry top advertisers from The Strip to the Thomas Mack Center (home of the UNLV Runnin' Rebels basketball team), to witness a concert and party for 10,000 of the company's best friends (and employees).

I witnessed a scene of a well-known industry pioneer holding center stage and slurping down dozens of oysters while tossing off his, uh, unique opinions about the parentage of other industry pioneers amidst a magazine-sponsored bacchanal at a local watering hole.

I witnessed a client of mine making the snap decision to extend a gargantuan party another two hours (at a cost of a mere $20K) when the midnight bell struck one year.

No booth could be big enough, no idea weird enough. One company brought in professional boxers to its booth knock the crap out of each other on-site in full view of us gawking, white-collar wimps. I got autographs from Spud Webb, from Nadia Comaneci, from Reggie Jackson, from other various and sundry athletes and "personalities" booked to stump for technology about which I'm sure they had not a clue.

Amidst the excess, which admittedly, was a lot of fun, was the dawning, disturbing realization that the show was losing any focus that it ever had. Bill Gates keynotes became rock-star events, with squadrons of just-folks driving their mobile homes across the desert to witness the man live onstage at the Alladdin. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but in the late 90s and into the year 2000 it was clear that Comdex was becoming something that it had never intended to be.

It's certainly easy enough to point fingers at those most culpable. I certainly have my opinions--as a Comdex exhibitor, attendee, speaker, and partier over the years--but rather than single out a lot of individuals, let's just say that the original Comdex management team seem to have a fairly callous attitude toward the people it needed to care the most about, namely, its exhibitors.

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

Comdex was always free to "qualified" attendees, so derived most of its revenue from renting exhibition space, bolstered by ancillary promos at the venue, a show guide, and of course, its notorious cut of the hotel revenue. Show management never had to cater particularly to attendees, and as the years went by, cast an increasingly wide net as to which "qualified" attendees it would solicit to attend the event.

Show management's attitude toward attendees was neither particularly helpful nor hostile. Since the large majority of attendees were getting in for free, there was no compelling reason for serious consideration as to how these people were served. A smaller number of attendees, maybe 2%, paid increasingly substantial fees to attend seminars and tutorials at Comdex, and my observation was that these Comdex "sessions" could actually be quite useful. I've always felt that this aspect of the event was underserved and underdeveloped over the years.

Failure, in My Opinion

But the true failure of Comdex management related to its treatment of exhibitors. It's no secret that a large percentage of show attendance was a function of exhibiting companies. IDG probably sent three or four hundred people every year through its various divisions, and IDG was a relatively modest exhibitor. The major U.S. and Japanese technology companies, most of whom had tremendous presences at the show over the years collectively sent untold thousands of people from every level of their organizations to Las Vegas.

And management treated these companies abysmally. Whether exercising no apparent control over attendee quality, profiteering on accommodations, taking the hardest line possible in a boiler-room atmosphere to re-sign exhibitors, or standing aloof from the actual proceedings while preening to global media that attendance figures had set a new record, I saw very little good will being developed over the years.

The warning signs were there all along. Apple pulled out sometime relatively early on, then IBM made a loud noise about abandoning the show in the late 90s. The major Japanese vendors seemed to be less aggressive. The buzz within the industry was that maybe Comdex was not really as important as it had been. (The irony being that by the late 90s much of the former inconvenience was gone: the building boom had created tens of thousands of high-quality new rooms, shuttle service was vastly improved, and all the exhibits were mostly located in two spectacular venues, the expanded Las Vegas Convention Center and the new Sands Convention Center, built by the show's original owner.)

Then came the technology meltdown. Already in freefall by November 2000, the industry bravely kept its commitments to Comdex that year and produced what was billed as a record-breaking show that is best remembered for the ubiquitous throngs of unfortunate immigrants immediately outside the convention center, slapping sleazy sex-related flyers into unwitting attendees' hands. (The witting attendees, of course, had figured out the finer details of the Vegas demimonde years before.)

Comdex would probably have had trouble surviving the meltdown in any case. When hundreds of former exhibitors are simply no longer in business, when others lose two-thirds or more of their market value, and when criminals flying airplanes into buildings deeply chill the travel industry, who can expect a colossus such as Comdex to remain healthy? But I can tell you that very few, if any, tears were shed by executives making the decision to erase the show from their marketing plans.

I doubt anyone over the years got any sort of warm feeling when thinking about the crew in charge of the event. Yes, business is business, and you don't go into business to make good friends of everyone. But the best companies serve their customers with a smile, with consideration for their needs, and with a commitment to develop professional relationships that are rewarding and can stand the inevitable stresses that occur when business starts to go bad. Comdex seemed to have zero commitment to its customers, and now the show is paying the ultimate price.

How Many Did You Say?

There were never 200,000 people there, of course. Friend-of-a-friend estimates have always told me total attendance peaked at somewhere around 60,000. But even that crowd was big enough to give the place a feel of a supremely healthy industry creating a new, improved global society empowered by humankind's marvelous digital machines and the code that made them run.

The 200,000 figure, though, remains stuck in my craw. Why did this apparent fiction need to be touted over and over? Why did mindless media reports repeat it without challenge? Why can't we humans tell the truth about such a simple fact as how many people showed up to the party?

Now that the party is over, it will be exceedingly difficult for anyone to tell the truth. Say you throw a major technology gig in Las Vegas, or San Francisco or New York, and 25,000 people show up. By this, I mean 25,000 people who should be there, who either buy, create, or report seriously on technology. Would your efforts be lauded? Probably not. Because as long as the false Holy Grail of 200K is held out there, anything less will be considered a disappointment and a sign that technology STILL HASN'T COME BACK.

Epitaph

I mourn today's announcement. I viewed Comdex as a talented child with bad parents. Despite its parents' attempts to make the event as unpleasant as possible over the years, you know, the show was an absolute killer. It was there at the dawn of the industry, it grew with the industry, it defined the industry. There were a lot of great times at Comdex over the years, and yes, a lot of business got transacted. It was the one time each year that you knew you would run into everyone you knew in the industry, exchange some small talk, some large talk, and see how they were doing. It was the place where you could see which companies were on fire and which were flaming out.

Hey, I got to meet Nadia Comaneci at this show. She brought "a perfect 10" into everyday vocabulary, and set a standard for perfection that many still strive to achieve, no matter what their endeavor.

Today's management team says not to worry, that the show will be back in 2005. Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

Roger Strukhoff (@IoT2040) is Executive Director of the Tau Institute for Global ICT Research, with offices in Illinois and Manila. He is Conference Chair of @CloudExpo & @ThingsExpo, and Editor of SYS-CON Media's CloudComputing BigData & IoT Journals. He holds a BA from Knox College & conducted MBA studies at CSU-East Bay.

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.

Please wait while we process your request...

Your feedback has been submitted for approval.

Most Recent Comments

Predictable06/24/04 07:27:22 PM EDT

Already last year the Washington Post wrote, quoting Computerworld:

But despite some big-ticket announcements during the week and the A-list execs who trumpeted their companies, some techies and tech watchers are not so bullish about Comdex's future. Computerworld said "the verdict from many attendees was that the show's organizer, MediaLive International Inc., has a long way to go to make Comdex relevant to IT leaders. One major problem cited by many of those on hand was the very visible absence of important IT vendors on the exhibit floor, including Oracle Corp., Novell Inc. and Linux vendors Red Hat Inc. and SUSE Linux AG."

DrP06/24/04 07:20:48 PM EDT

Just mirrors the rest of the corporate world of IT. Mammoth "shotgun" approaches are out, specialization is in. As someone who attended the shows in the past, although I'll miss some of the spectacle, I won't miss trudging through multiple massive convention center halls, trying to find the important technologies amidst the glitz and hype.

Outsourcing wins06/24/04 06:53:46 PM EDT

I hear it's moving next year to Bangalore.

radiumhahm06/24/04 06:51:54 PM EDT

Good! Now high tech start-ups can spend investment dollars on worthwhile things like "making products people want" and "hiring salespeople to sell them" and god forbid "quality support and documentation"...goodbye to bad garbage. The only thing you get from comdex is a bill and the knowledge of how many strippers will fit on your lap at once. A lot of people squander it and don't learn that second thing.

silverhalide06/24/04 06:40:02 PM EDT

Public trade shows in general are dying, IMO. Before, they served as a big marketplace of new stuff, but with the internet at the level it's at now, there's nothing new once you hit the tradeshow floor as you've heard about it already.

Also, since tradeshows are traditionally targetted at business-to-business type transactions and networking, I doubt that shows like Comdex actually netted exhibitors signficant sales. When you get a bunch of geeks wandering around, chatting up exhibitors, but not spending any money, it chases away both exhibitors and attendees who prefer to go to more exclusive gatherings.

Now, industry-insider tradeshows (The ones you have to know someone to get into), now THOSE are still the places to be at, if you're fortunate enough to get into one. Try IAAPA or the Bar and Nightclub show on for size (those are simply fantastic).

Comdex was killed by a number of things. The internet makes physically attending shows less necessary. Not only that with so many thousands of IT jobs sent overseas, many of those who might have attended in the past are no longer in IT at all. And the current generation of technology (I know, not well defined) has matured somewhat. There just isn't much in the way of mind blowing, paradigm shifting technologies that demand a Comdex. And heck, the consumer tech oriented shows like CES or E3 are more fun!

The company I work for only sent upper management, instead of developers to COMDEX. I think COMDEX has been dying because the people who needed to be there weren't, therefore the content presented became more manager-friendly (i.e. stuff we've all heard before, marketing-babble, etc).

tirefire06/24/04 06:33:48 PM EDT

I don't care what happens as long as I can get my webcast fix of keynotes at Macworld and the WWDC. Anyway, doesn't admission to these kinds of things cost ~$1500? I can see why, at this price, no one would want to go...

JRHelgeson06/24/04 06:05:00 PM EDT

I attended Comdex for the first time in 1995, back when the convergence was taking place between multimedia and computer systems. 3D graphics cards were the newest, hottest things, the Pentium 166 was the fastest processor on the market, DVD's were known as Super Density Roms or SD-ROM (and the burners cost $30,000) and USB was unheard of.

The internet was tiny, compared to what it is now and wasn't even talked about much at the show.

In 1996, I started a computer consulting company in Utah and every November I would close up shop and take all my technicians down to Comdex. It was great! We could take them all to one place and they would get up to speed on every hot new technology in the marketplace. It was invaluable.

We would take that information back to the office and use it in our consulting business - it essentially provided us with the exposure to the technologies we needed to then go out and sell it to our customers.

We did this for every year until I sold the business in 1999, which also happened to mark the downturn in the quality of the show as well as attendance.

It was great to watch it over those years when astounding changes were taking place in the industry from year to year.

I guess in time, all good things must come to an end...

salesgeek06/24/04 06:02:24 PM EDT

Comdex was already dead. It was at its best in the early '90s -- that's when all the big, bad earth shattering kabooms were announced. DesqView... Windows... Gupta SQL... WordPerfect versions... etc... New Intel Chips.

Everything was timed around comdex. And a lot of companies unloaded the marketing budget, too.

By 1994 the show was ruined by Microsoft the WindowsWorld sideshow became almost as big as the actual comdex show. Now the industry is so fragmented. By the way - Whatever happened to NBI - makers of Legacy - the best ever word processor?

Saw This Coming06/24/04 05:49:40 PM EDT

Comdex was more than a place for tea and crumpets, it was a place where average Joe IT could come, check out the babeage, get the toys, drool at the pundification, and check out all the cool techtoys to recommend to their bosses. It was the engine of the soul of IT.

About the time of the .dotcom kabloom, Comdex bosses thought they were finally in the uppity ranks, and closed it all off except to ''vips'' and other fortune50-exclusive folks. No more parties, just drivle from the big guys. They took out all the reason to go.

Then again, they were innovators in showing the rest of the industry how to commit suicide by banning their customers and throwing away their products. Too bad there''s nothing left to part out.

BnkToTheFuture.com is the largest online investment platform for investing in FinTech, Bitcoin and Blockchain companies. We believe the future of finance looks very different from the past and we aim to invest and provide trading opportunities for qualifying investors that want to build a portfolio in the sector in compliance with international financial regulations.

A strange thing is happening along the way to the Internet of Things, namely far too many devices to work with and manage. It has become clear that we'll need much higher efficiency user experiences that can allow us to more easily and scalably work with the thousands of devices that will soon be in each of our lives. Enter the conversational interface revolution, combining bots we can literally talk with, gesture to, and even direct with our thoughts, with embedded artificial intelligence, whic...

Imagine if you will, a retail floor so densely packed with sensors that they can pick up the movements of insects scurrying across a store aisle. Or a component of a piece of factory equipment so well-instrumented that its digital twin provides resolution down to the micrometer.

In his keynote at 18th Cloud Expo, Andrew Keys, Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise, provided an overview of the evolution of the Internet and the Database and the future of their combination – the Blockchain. Andrew Keys is Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settle...

Product connectivity goes hand and hand these days with increased use of personal data. New IoT devices are becoming more personalized than ever before.
In his session at 22nd Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo, Nicolas Fierro, CEO of MIMIR Blockchain Solutions, will discuss how in order to protect your data and privacy, IoT applications need to embrace Blockchain technology for a new level of product security never before seen - or needed.

Leading companies, from the Global Fortune 500 to the smallest companies, are adopting hybrid cloud as the path to business advantage. Hybrid cloud depends on cloud services and on-premises infrastructure working in unison. Successful implementations require new levels of data mobility, enabled by an automated and seamless flow across on-premises and cloud resources. In his general session at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Tevis, an IBM Storage Software Technical Strategist and Customer Solution Architec...

Nordstrom is transforming the way that they do business and the cloud is the key to enabling speed and hyper personalized customer experiences. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ken Schow, VP of Engineering at Nordstrom, discussed some of the key learnings and common pitfalls of large enterprises moving to the cloud. This includes strategies around choosing a cloud provider(s), architecture, and lessons learned. In addition, he covered some of the best practices for structured team migration an...

No hype cycles or predictions of a gazillion things here. IoT is here. You get it. You know your business and have great ideas for a business transformation strategy. What comes next? Time to make it happen. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jay Mason, an Associate Partner of Analytics, IoT & Cybersecurity at M&S Consulting, presented a step-by-step plan to develop your technology implementation strategy. He also discussed the evaluation of communication standards and IoT messaging protocols, data...

Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell. In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Cola, and Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, discussed how from store operations and ...

In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Raju Shreewastava, founder of Big Data Trunk, provided a fun and simple way to introduce Machine Leaning to anyone and everyone. He solved a machine learning problem and demonstrated an easy way to be able to do machine learning without even coding.
Raju Shreewastava is the founder of Big Data Trunk (www.BigDataTrunk.com), a Big Data Training and consulting firm with offices in the United States. He previously led the data warehouse/business intelligence and B...

"IBM is really all in on blockchain. We take a look at sort of the history of blockchain ledger technologies. It started out with bitcoin, Ethereum, and IBM evaluated these particular blockchain technologies and found they were anonymous and permissionless and that many companies were looking for permissioned blockchain," stated René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Conventi...

When shopping for a new data processing platform for IoT solutions, many development teams want to be able to test-drive options before making a choice. Yet when evaluating an IoT solution, it’s simply not feasible to do so at scale with physical devices. Building a sensor simulator is the next best choice; however, generating a realistic simulation at very high TPS with ease of configurability is a formidable challenge. When dealing with multiple application or transport protocols, you would be...

Smart cities have the potential to change our lives at so many levels for citizens: less pollution, reduced parking obstacles, better health, education and more energy savings. Real-time data streaming and the Internet of Things (IoT) possess the power to turn this vision into a reality. However, most organizations today are building their data infrastructure to focus solely on addressing immediate business needs vs. a platform capable of quickly adapting emerging technologies to address future ...

We are given a desktop platform with Java 8 or Java 9 installed and seek to find a way to deploy high-performance Java applications that use Java 3D and/or Jogl without having to run an installer. We are subject to the constraint that the applications be signed and deployed so that they can be run in a trusted environment (i.e., outside of the sandbox). Further, we seek to do this in a way that does not depend on bundling a JRE with our applications, as this makes downloads and installations rat...

Widespread fragmentation is stalling the growth of the IIoT and making it difficult for partners to work together. The number of software platforms, apps, hardware and connectivity standards is creating paralysis among businesses that are afraid of being locked into a solution.
EdgeX Foundry is unifying the community around a common IoT edge framework and an ecosystem of interoperable components.

DX World EXPO, LLC, a Lighthouse Point, Florida-based startup trade show producer and the creator of "DXWorldEXPO® - Digital Transformation Conference & Expo" has announced its executive management team. The team is headed by Levent Selamoglu, who has been named CEO. "Now is the time for a truly global DX event, to bring together the leading minds from the technology world in a conversation about Digital Transformation," he said in making the announcement.

In this strange new world where more and more power is drawn from business technology, companies are effectively straddling two paths on the road to innovation and transformation into digital enterprises. The first path is the heritage trail – with “legacy” technology forming the background. Here, extant technologies are transformed by core IT teams to provide more API-driven approaches. Legacy systems can restrict companies that are transitioning into digital enterprises. To truly become a lead...

Digital Transformation (DX) is not a "one-size-fits all" strategy. Each organization needs to develop its own unique, long-term DX plan. It must do so by realizing that we now live in a data-driven age, and that technologies such as Cloud Computing, Big Data, the IoT, Cognitive Computing, and Blockchain are only tools. In her general session at 21st Cloud Expo, Rebecca Wanta explained how the strategy must focus on DX and include a commitment from top management to create great IT jobs, monitor ...

"Cloud Academy is an enterprise training platform for the cloud, specifically public clouds. We offer guided learning experiences on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and all the surrounding methodologies and technologies that you need to know and your teams need to know in order to leverage the full benefits of the cloud," explained Alex Brower, VP of Marketing at Cloud Academy, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clar...

The IoT Will Grow: In what might be the most obvious prediction of the decade, the IoT will continue to expand next year, with more and more devices coming online every single day. What isn’t so obvious about this prediction: where that growth will occur. The retail, healthcare, and industrial/supply chain industries will likely see the greatest growth. Forrester Research has predicted the IoT will become “the backbone” of customer value as it continues to grow. It is no surprise that retail is ...

Blockchain. A day doesn’t seem to go by without seeing articles and discussions about the technology. According to PwC executive Seamus Cushley, approximately $1.4B has been invested in blockchain just last year. In Gartner’s recent hype cycle for emerging technologies, blockchain is approaching the peak. It is considered by Gartner as one of the ‘Key platform-enabling technologies to track.’ While there is a lot of ‘hype vs reality’ discussions going on, there is no arguing that blockchain is being taken very seriously across industries and cannot be ignored.

Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across business networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation's open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost as well as advance trade. Are you curious about how Blockchain is built for business? In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, discussed the basics of Blockchain, previewed the Blockchain Reference Architecture, and introduced the mechanics o...

A strange thing is happening along the way to the Internet of Things, namely far too many devices to work with and manage. It has become clear that we'll need much higher efficiency user experiences that can allow us to more easily and scalably work with the thousands of devices that will soon be in each of our lives. Enter the conversational interface revolution, combining bots we can literally talk with, gesture to, and even direct with our thoughts, with embedded artificial intelligence, which can process our conversational commands and orchestrate the outcomes we request across our persona...

Imagine if you will, a retail floor so densely packed with sensors that they can pick up the movements of insects scurrying across a store aisle. Or a component of a piece of factory equipment so well-instrumented that its digital twin provides resolution down to the micrometer.

Bitcoins are a digital cryptocurrency and have been around since 2009. As a substitute for legal tender, they are becoming the rage for investors and others but because there is no government agency auditing or performing regulatory oversights, you wonder if it is the perfect breeding ground for electronic nano crime. Since the introduction of the Bitcoin, some competitors have emerged and the whole segment of cryptocurrencies are defined as Altcoins. Altcoins include Dogecoin, Ethereum Feathercoin, Litecoin, Novacoin, Peercoin, and Zetacoin. Some of these cryptocurrencies are considered impro...

It took Magellan's crew three years sailing ships to circumnavigate the earth. Today, at hypersonic speeds of 7,680 MPH, it takes just over three hours to circumnavigate the earth. Data on the Internet, however, travels at 670 million MPH, which means it only takes milliseconds to circumnavigate the earth. In this age of digital businesses and digital interactions, companies must digitally transform to work effectively in a world where mass information moves at these unimaginable speeds.

Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell. In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Cola, and Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, discussed how from store operations and optimization to employee training and insights, all ultimately create the best customer experience b...

"IBM is really all in on blockchain. We take a look at sort of the history of blockchain ledger technologies. It started out with bitcoin, Ethereum, and IBM evaluated these particular blockchain technologies and found they were anonymous and permissionless and that many companies were looking for permissioned blockchain," stated René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

When shopping for a new data processing platform for IoT solutions, many development teams want to be able to test-drive options before making a choice. Yet when evaluating an IoT solution, it’s simply not feasible to do so at scale with physical devices. Building a sensor simulator is the next best choice; however, generating a realistic simulation at very high TPS with ease of configurability is a formidable challenge. When dealing with multiple application or transport protocols, you would be looking at some significant engineering investment.
On-demand, serverless computing enables deve...

From manual human effort the world is slowly paving its way to a new space where most process are getting replaced with tools and systems to improve efficiency and bring down operational costs. Automation is the next big thing and low code platforms are fueling it in a significant way.
The Automation era is here. We are in the fast pace of replacing manual human efforts with machines and processes. In the world of Information Technology too, we are linking disparate systems, softwares and tools to make things self sustaining. This is called Automation.It has been helping companies overcome t...

By 2020, 90 percent of all new cars will have some sort of built-in connectivity platform, and by 2022, there will be 1.8 billion automotive M2M connections. As cars join the Internet of Things, cars will stop being independent entities and will become part of a larger, connected ecosystem. Cars as part of the IoT isn’t just a look into the future – it’s already happening.
“Everything that moves will become autonomic, it’s just a matter of time,” says Vishnu Andhare, Consulting Manager at ISG. Andhare notes that all of the big automotive players are already moving towards a future of shared m...

Decentralization of everything, the great new idea of which the web can’t stop babbling, might still seem a bit utopian if you inspect it closely.
Yes, blockchains are likely to reshape our economy, or a huge part of it, and benefit considerably those who are currently unbanked.
They might also facilitate the creation of rating/reputation systems that are not controlled by any single entity and thus allow people (say Uber drivers who’d like to work for Lyft) to switch employers without having to establish their credibility anew.
They might give users complete control over their assets; prot...

There is a fundamental flaw in how many people think about digital transformation. First, as we’ve written about extensively at Intellyx, people tend to think about it as a finite corporate project, rather than as a process of continual transformation. There is a deeper flaw in thinking, however, that leads to this type of project mentality. Enterprise leaders commonly think of transformation as something done at a corporate level — something the organization does to itself. But that mindset creates a separation between the act of transformation at an organizational level and the transformatio...

These days, APIs have become an integral part of the digital transformation journey for all enterprises. Every digital innovation story is connected to APIs . But have you ever pondered over to know what are the source of these APIs? Let me explain - APIs sources can be varied, internal or external, solving different purposes, but mostly categorized into the following two categories. Data lakes is a term used to represent disconnected but relevant data that are used by various business units within an enterprise. APIs are created as the easy access points for these siloed data lakes.

We are given a desktop platform with Java 8 or Java 9 installed and seek to find a way to deploy high-performance Java applications that use Java 3D and/or Jogl without having to run an installer. We are subject to the constraint that the applications be signed and deployed so that they can be run in a trusted environment (i.e., outside of the sandbox). Further, we seek to do this in a way that does not depend on bundling a JRE with our applications, as this makes downloads and installations rather long.

There is a story emerging about the role the Internet of Things (IoT) has played in disaster preparedness. Indeed this technology has matured to the point that it is making a real and measurable impact in helping communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disaster.

AI technology is ever evolving and some believe it could be the next digital frontier. Today, the artificial intelligence revolution seems to be transforming every business in just about every industry from auto to banking to retail and beyond. The gaming industry is no exception.

Bert Loomis was a visionary. This general session will highlight how Bert Loomis and people like him inspire us to build great things with small inventions. In their general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Architect at IBM Bluemix, and Michael O'Neill, Strategic Business Development at Nvidia, discussed the accelerating pace of AI development and how IBM Cloud and NVIDIA are partnering to bring AI capabilities to "every day," on-demand. They also reviewed two "free infrastructure" programs available to startups and innovators.

There is a war a-brewin’, but this war will be fought with wits and not brute strength. Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration that “the nation that leads in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be the ruler of the world,” the press and analysts have created hysteria regarding the ramifications of artificial intelligence on everything from public education to unemployment to healthcare to Skynet.
Note: artificial intelligence (AI) endows applications with the ability to automatically learn and adapt from experience via interacting with the surroundings / environment. See the b...

A strong declaration from a historically antagonist foe should put chills in the hearts of Americans preparing themselves for the world ahead: Russian President Vladimir Putin says the nation that leads in AI will be the ruler of the world [1]” … The ruler of the world!
From the article (with some modification to avoid political landmines), we get the following:
“The development of artificial intelligence has increasingly become a national security concern in recent years. It is China and the US (not Russia), which are seen as the two frontrunners, with China recently announcing its ambi...

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.